(Georgia Recorder) — The U.S. military is busy in Georgia.
The state’s military assets range from the No. 1 installation in the country for land warfare maneuver exercises at Fort Moore near Columbus to a major Department of Defense forensic lab in the country at the Fort Gillem Enclave south of Atlanta and the U.S. Army’s Cyber Command Center in Augusta.
Over at Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Camden County, the Navy is preparing to transition its submarines from the Ohio class to the Columbia class nuclear weapons submarines, which the Navy hopes will serve as a sea-based nuclear deterrent into the 2080s.
At Moody Air Force Base near Valdosta, troops are preparing to retire their A-10 attack aircraft to be replaced with a squadron of F-35 fighters.
Back in the 1990s, Moody was placed on the Base Realignment and Closure list which meant it was set to be shut down. But community members like Lucy Greene, who, in 1991, co-founded the Moody Support Committee, led a successful effort to spare the base.
Greene said she sees the new F-35 mission as a positive sign that the Air Force values Moody’s role in national defense, and that aircraft will be lifting off for years to come. She said that means more for the community than national pride or the infusion of dollars from people working on or near the base.
“The impact of the base is far-reaching, beyond the economic impact,” she said. “We have so many of the spouses and families who are involved in our community, and they bring in so much knowledge and experience to our area.”
Greene said U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff personally called her to break the news. Ossoff pushed for the new aircraft, which was announced last year and is set to begin arriving in 2029.
In an interview with the Georgia Recorder this fall, Ossoff said as a newly sworn-in senator in early 2021, he vowed to meet with enlisted men and women as well as advocates like Greene in addition to top leaders.
“The first thing I did was to set a policy for my team that whenever I went out to a defense installation in Georgia, we were going to try not just to meet with the brass but to sit down with junior enlisted personnel and military spouses to understand the issues that were impacting them every day,” he said.
Ossoff ousted incumbent GOP Sen. David Perdue in a pair of 2021 runoffs that sent him and Rev. Raphael Warnock to the U.S. Senate, giving Democrats a narrow majority in that chamber and cementing Georgia’s battleground status. Warnock won a full six-year term in 2022, and Ossoff will be on the ballot again in 2026.
Republican state Rep. Josh Bonner, a Fayetteville Republican and chair of the House Defense and Veterans Affairs Committee, said he and Ossoff may not see eye to eye, but he said he doesn’t question Ossoff’s commitment to the military.
“I think that both (Ossoff and Sen. Raphael Warnock) share our concerns with our veterans,” he said. “I think absolutely they’re gonna do everything possible. I’ve had more interaction with Sen. Ossoff’s office, and he’s got a great veteran services guy that gets it and is very present and is very involved.”
Bonner said his committee has also been pushing for more responsiveness from the VA.
“Having both of our senators focus on this over the next couple of years would absolutely be a great thing for Georgia. I don’t care if you’re Republican or Democrat, you know, I think we can all agree on the fact that if somebody like our service members has already earned a benefit, they ought to be receiving it, right? I don’t think there’s any daylight between what we on my side of the aisle want to do for our veterans than anybody else.”
‘Military quality of life is a national security issue’
Ossoff said it was a meeting with enlisted troops at Fort Stewart where he learned that women soldiers often wear ill-fitting body armor designed to fit men, which can put them at risk for injury in combat or training. Ossoff was part of a bipartisan team of senators that passed a provision securing more funding for women’s body armor in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act.
Another meeting with troops at what was then Fort Gordon, now Fort Eisenhower led to an investigation of poor conditions in privately managed housing on the base. Ossoff released findings in 2022, which revealed shocking stories from servicemembers whose families were suffering from living in unsafe conditions.
“Infestation of vermin, mold, rotting structures, just housing conditions that weren’t just inconvenient, but actually put the health of the families living in these homes at risk,” he said.
“So that spurred me to launch a nearly year-long investigation of how Balfour Beatty was managing these homes and what military families were experiencing in them, which culminated in hearings in Washington where we put Balfour Beatty executives under oath in public on Capitol Hill to explain themselves and how they were going to fix it.”
In 2023, the Army announced it would perform unit-by-unit inspection of the housing. A Senate follow-up investigation the same year found that while serious problems still remain, the Army and the company that manages the housing had made some progress in addressing the issues.
“What I have found is that when you put these executives, these wealthy business people who are making their money – in this case, in my opinion, they were making their money exploiting military families – under oath, under bright lights on national television, you motivate them to do a better job,” Ossoff said.
Ossoff, whose background includes work in foreign policy and national security issues as well as investigative journalism, said members of Congress all want to fund the military, but that funding often comes in the form of cutting-edge hardware and weapons, and the needs of the average man or woman in uniform can often be ignored.
“It’s about political priorities,” he said. “So what you find when you look at U.S. military spending is that the latest, greatest, multi-billion dollar gold-plated weapons system is robustly funded, but the care and well-being and salaries and housing and health care of the junior enlisted personnel and military families has been neglected.”
That can be more than just a morale problem, Ossoff added.
“We have an obligation to do right by those who serve, and it’s not just a matter of honoring the service and sacrifice of the young men and women who serve and their families, it is also a national security issue,” he said. “Military quality of life is a national security issue. Because if people join the armed forces and then find that they’re underpaid, they’re living in deplorable housing, we can’t retain that talent in the military. We can’t recruit talent into the military if we are poorly treating junior enlisted personnel.”
Heather Hall, CEO and founder of the nonprofit Military Housing Coalition and resident of Fort Moore, said housing affordability can be another big problem.
The military pays for members to live in civilian housing using something called the Basic Allowance for Housing, which factors in the service member’s rank, number of dependents and the housing market around their duty station. But many enlisted men and women report the allowance does not actually provide enough to secure a decent home. That was the case near Fort Moore a few years ago, Hall said.
“Families couldn’t afford housing off the installation, so it kind of caused this influx of families that were waiting for on-post housing, which created just a perfect storm,” she said.
Hall said she credits Ossoff with helping bring a 22% increase in the housing allowance for the ranks who were dealing with the most problems about two years ago.
Ossoff said his next priorities are a pair of bipartisan bills aimed at improving VA benefits. The Veterans Home Loan Fairness Act, co-sponsored by Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who is also president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, seeks to make it easier for veterans to qualify for VA home loans by removing childcare expenses from loan calculations. A separate bill, co-sponsored by Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, would require the VA to contact servicemembers who are returning to civilian life before they discharge to help them file for disability benefits if they are eligible, with the goal of creating a smoother transition.
